New App Lets Stoners Measure “Oregano” With Their iPhones

We’ve all been there: You’re buying some oregano from a friend of a friend, and you don’t have enough money for a full spice jar. So you and your roommate (who also likes oregano) decide to go splitsies. But when the time comes to divide your purchase, how do you make sure the portions are even?

Enter Steady Square.

Asaf (Reddit user asafagus) originally set out to create a simple, all-purpose scale app to let anyone with an iPhone 6S weigh objects on their screens. But then he discovered that another team tried this a few months ago and got rejected by the Apple Store.

So Asaf had to find a novel workaround.

“Apple doesn’t want people weighing things on their phone,” he shares in a now-deleted YouTube video. “So instead I made a game that is completely unrelated.”

His app, called Steady Square, looks like a Flappy Bird-inspired game in which players vary the amount of pressure applied by their fingers to determine how high or low the square sits on the screen.

But this is just a cover for the real appeal of the app: A functioning scale hidden in the game’s “Training” mode.

Here’s how it works.

First, you place a conductive spoon down on the screen.

(As Asaf explains in a comment, the spoon is the best platform for weighing objects because it offers a single point of contact on the screen and a “conductive” material that simulates finger pressure.)

Then you take the object you want to measure. Asaf chooses a dreidel, in honor of Hanukkah.

Set the object on top of the spoon:

Use a calculator to convert this number into grams:

(To get the object’s isolated weight, subtract the weight of the spoon. Then, since Steady Square is on a 0-1000 scale, with 1000 representing 385 grams, you have to divide the object’s weight by 1000 and multiply that number by 385.)

Asaf notes that you can use Steady Square to measure everything from fruits and vegetables to postage and Rubik’s cubes:

Or “oregano”:

Reddit user asafagus

And even “powdered sugar”:

Reddit user asafagus

In fairness to Asaf, the inclusion of powdered sugar as a nod to cocaine seems to be a joke (let’s hope), but the oregano in the video points to a very real market of regular cannabis consumers who would prefer to weigh their weed through a simple app over a clunky physical scale.

Luckily, redditors in the Trees community—where Asaf posted his video—understood right away:

But as the ill-fated scale apps that preceded Steady Square have shown, Apple doesn’t seem to want digital scale apps on the Apple Store right now. And an overt drug reference could be grounds to ban the app unless it’s restricted to locations where weed is legal.

Hence Asaf’s attempt to preempt the wrath of Apple at the end of his video:

“I just want to reiterate in case someone out there is questioning the purpose of this app,” he states, as the video displays Apple’s logo, “Steady Square is a game, not a scale.”

In the meantime, iPhone 6s owners are free to use the “game” however they like. But if you’re measuring anything stronger than oregano, be prepared to do some math while high.